The importance of storytelling for digital marketers

Corporate storytelling can be considered a relatively new, yet effective, marketing tactic and SEO tool when building a brand’s online and offline presence. This involves writing compelling and emotional stories that customers can relate to.

The latest Google Panda algorithm update made sure that SEOs and marketers were creating relevant and high-quality content on their websites had, in turn, increases visibility on the SERPs.

With that in mind, it is now more important than ever to write content to engage and increase the user’s experience (UX) and not just for the bots crawling the site. Storytelling can assist in closing the gap between what customers are searching for and what search engines are looking for by using natural, yet powerful language that appeals to both parties.

Why Should SEOs Care About Storytelling?

By integrating a carefully designed SEO strategy into content marketing, this can help brands to tell their story in a credible and readable way, therefore, increasing the loyalty, trust, and engagement. This can help in strengthening the customer relationship, whilst also increasing brand awareness. I have listed the key areas that you can improve by taking a combined ‘storytelling’ and SEO approach to creating content on your site.

Click Through Rates

Click through rates are, as we all know, incredibly important as the higher your click-through rate the more traffic you will get to your site.

To improve your click-through rates you should think carefully about how you tell your brand story. By communicating your brand story well through your title, metas, and core content on your site, you are more likely to be remembered by your website visitors which will ultimately give you the edge of your competitors.

By creating valuable content for users, search engines will also identify your website as being more useful and should increase your rankings in the SERPs. By ensuring that you are telling your brand story through titles, metas and core content, you should notice an increase in click-through rates. Users notice the brand with the confidence of solving their need over rivals in the market.

User Engagement

Consistent and credible content through telling a brand’s story, particularly on a company and about us pages, can increase user engagement upon truly understanding the businesses timeline to get them to the position that they’re in today. This can be especially important for lead generation websites when initiating user interest towards the brand through compelling leads being created.

We now live in an age where it is somewhat difficult to truly engage users as they are being bombarded with potentially similar messages and lose interest altogether. By being tactile and applying sensory marketing to a brand’s story you are enabling the user to truly experience your business and values. This can increase the time spent on page significantly, reducing bounce rates and ensure the brand is memorable.

Link Building

As well as users, journalists and editors are also particularly interested with company stories that evoke our emotions through using human elements to describe the brand. Corporate ‘about us’ pages can display the relevance and aid in developing trust when deciding what organisation to feature on their site.

Great content being produced and linking out should leave the user eager to mention this story to their close social circle, which can be shared on social media platforms. The power of social media as an additional link building purpose guides a broader reach and diversity of traffic with a universal appeal almost instantaneously. With a greater reach being available, the storytelling content can become a lot more powerful as users continue to engage with the brand.

Conclusion

An amazing example of effectively telling a brand’s story and capturing their target audience’s attention comes from The National Trust. This video was initially created for marketing the brand internally amongst employees, to make the vision and mission of the brand known. However, the video perfectly illustrated a clear narrative and communicated the brand’s story, which certainly impacted the user’s perception of the brand’s identity.

So, what is your business’s story? Let us know in the comments below!

The importance of storytelling for digital marketers was last modified: June 21st, 2018 by Georgie Kemp

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SEO Analyst

Georgie is a BA Marketing graduate from Nottingham Trent University working as an SEO Analyst. She works carefully to assist SEO executives and strategists to achieve the best possible results for clients, both on and off-page.

Georgie is a BA Marketing graduate from Nottingham Trent University working as an SEO Analyst. She works carefully to assist SEO executives and strategists to achieve the best possible results for clients, both on and off-page.